IEEE Standards For Voting Machines

kgeiger writes "Voting machine designs and data formats are a free-for-all. The result is poor validation and hence opportunity for fraud. An IEEE standards group wants all election computer systems to speak the same language. From the article: 'IEEE Standards Project 1622 is working on electronic data interchange for voting systems. The plan is to create a common format, based on the Election Markup Language (EML) already recommended for use in Europe. This is a subset of the popular XML (eXtensible Markup Language) that specifies particular fields and data structures for use in voting.'"

Comments

Re:There is a more immediate problem

[hutsell]

Even at the likely risk of being considered a tin foil luddite, this is the one technology I wish would never be made, even if there is a "100% assuredness" in both accountability and transparency people can feel comfortable about, even when it is something done in autonomous isolation.

The political system of representative government is about people interacting with one another; voting should reflect that process. Regrettably, since the time and energy to write a compelling argument here is way beyond my present capabilities, I've resigned myself to being on the losing end on a personal viewpoint about the philosophy of politics.

Re:There is a more immediate problem

[DNS-and-BIND]

Everyone says this. It gets old. The PRI in Mexico rigged elections for 80 years using nothing but paper ballots.

Re:Yeah... no.

[Samantha Wright]

It doesn't matter whether or not it happens. They're creating a fucking file format. That hardly protects against (a) fraudulent data input or (b) fraudulent reporting of results. Time to upgrade to dead trees, guys.

Re:There is a more immediate problem

[kenorland]

The secret ballot where a ballot cannot be attached to a specific person after it has been cast is a fundamental part of our electoral system

Only since around the late 19th century, a little after the UK, and even today, many people vote by mail.

Secret ballots are a good idea, but I think people attach way too much importance to them. Once you get fraud down to within a few percentage points, it makes little difference, and the US is way below that.

Re:There is a more immediate problem

[amorsen]

It is fine to have machines counting the hand-marked slips of paper, so you can announce a preliminary result on election night -- although many places manage that perfectly well by hand.

The vote counters bring accountability to the table. You can never be truly sure that a machine is not compromised. If humans are compromised, we catch them and prosecute them, and a conspiracy needs to involve at least hundreds of people. With machines, a few people can compromise an entire election.

If you allow the machines into the voting booth, anonymous voting is in danger and voter mistakes become impossible to detect. If you allow them to actually record votes, the whole process becomes a joke.